by Frank Norris
“But the wheat remained. Untouched, unassailable, undefiled, that mighty world force, that nourisher of nations, wrapped in Nirvanic calm, indifferent to the human swarm, gigantic, resistless, moved onward in its appointed grooves.”
But it is impossible, Mr. Cooper justly criticises, to make a Colossus out of a steam-engine throughout an entire volume simply by dwarfing the men and women into “human insects,” “motes in the sunshine.” Norris, he thinks, began to realize his mistake, and in his second volume, “The Pit,” human life looms larger. Yet, Mr. Cooper writes in conclusion:
“‘The Pit is just as much a structural part of the whole design of Norris’s trilogy as was “The Octopus’; it has that same inherent epic bigness of theme; — a gigantic attempt to corner the entire world’s supply of wheat, to force it up, up, up, and hold the price through April, and May, and June, — and then finally the new crop comes pouring in and the daring speculator is overwhelmed by the rising tide, a human insect impotently striving to hold back with his puny hand the output of the whole world’s granaries.’”
From: The World’s Work, V. V, No. 6, April 1903, p.3276
“Frank Norris”
By: W.S. Rainsford, Rector of St. George’s, New York
We need today men who can see, who, seeing things and men as they are, can still firmly believe — believe in the general soundness of life, the “worth doing” of it all. And still more, we need men who can put down accurately what they see sanely. Such a student, believer, artist was Frank Norris.
He has left us in the very morning of his life. He has gone before he struck the stride of midday marching. The best he has given had promise of still better work. But he lived enough, and put enough life into his line, to give notice to all that he is of those who, even in youth, are content with nothing less than to see life sanely, and to see it whole.
The honesty, the bravery, the faith of the man, all live in his work. The pity of it, that time was given to him only to make a beginning. Frank Norris’s work rings true – always true. There is not one unmanly or unhealthy note struck. He takes it for granted that ordinary people, if we could only really see them, are interesting enough to write about, yet he never knows a trace of the sordid.
It was my privilege to be counted among his friends for years. I seldom have met so lovable a man. He had unquestionably great dramatic power. He believed with all his soul in the future of democracy, and ever and always he tried to serve his brother men.
From: American Literature, by Thomas Ernest Rankin and Wilford M. Aikin, Harcourt, Brace, 1922, p.257-259
Frank Norris. — Though born in Chicago, Frank Norris was taken to California so early in his life that the chief impressions which embodied themselves in his novels were derived from the life of the west coast. Norris was trained in a newspaper office, writing thus, he said, for the Plain People. In his early fiction he showed the influence of Stevenson in Moran of the Lady Letty (Norris’s one purely romantic book) and the influence of Zola in M c Teague (a strongly and repulsively realistic Frank Norris study in heredity and environment, which its author took four years to write). But Norris did not quite distinguish between the chief methods of those two masters. “For my own part,” he said (and he wrote fiction accordingly), “I believe that the greatest realism is the greatest romanticism, and I hope some day to prove it.” Norris wrote realistically, though not because he wanted to be a realist, as Zola did, but because he wanted to make evident to all readers the significance of the real, for, said he, “Literature is of all the arts the most democratic.”
Like David Graham Phillips, Norris was a pioneer, in twentieth century literature, because, for one thing, he believed that the novel is something essential to modern civilization,— “Essential,” he said, “because it expresses modern life better than architecture, better than painting, better than poetry, better than music. It is as necessary to the civilization of the twentieth century as the violin is to Kubelik, as the piano is to Paderewski. ... It is an instrument, a tool, a weapon, a vehicle. It is that thing which in the hand of a man makes him civilized and no longer a savage, because it gives him a power of durable, permanent expression.” The effect of such ideas, and of the work done in accordance with such ideas, particularly of the fine craftsmanship of that work, has been almost immeasurable, not only upon the younger generation of novelists, but also upon the older workers who have survived Norris.
Norris maintained that the novel is a greater molder of public opinion and of public morals than the press. “The press is read with lightning haste, and the morning news is waste paper by noon. But the novel goes into the home to stay. It is read word for word; is talked about, discussed; its influence penetrates every chink and corner of the family.” While Norris wrote for the people he did not write for popularity. He never truckled; never took off his hat to fashion and held it out for pennies. He was a realist for the sole reason that he believed it essential that people, “the People,” hear, not a lie, but the truth, and that they should understand that truth.
Norris’s aim was to write in prose fiction form the epic of our national life. He planned three volumes for this purpose: The Octopus; The Pit; and a third, which was to have been named The Wolf but which never saw the light, for he died at the age of thirty-seven, before he was able to put his plan into form. Wheat is the symbol of American life in these two volumes, as gold is in McTeague. The Octopus is the epic tale of the early Western railroad, the road that brooked no competition, that fed upon the labor of men, destroying them, and yet feeding the world with the Titan wheat harvests of Californian valleys. All the “baseness and the grandeur, the sensuality and the spirituality” which accompanies these gigantic operations is almost brutally set forth. Through “the iniquitous burden of extortionate freight rates, imposed like a yoke of iron” the railroad prevailed. “Men, — motes in the sunshine, — perished. . . . But the wheat remained.” The Pit is the story of Chicago wheat traders and trading, inferior in “strength and brilliancy and lyric quality,” as it is inferior in subject matter, to The Octopus. Yet it has been more widely read, for the obvious if not very commendable reason that in The Pit men and women are more “everyday” and like our too conventional selves. As an allegory The Octopus, though not worthy of being styled the great American novel, is yet a landmark, a sign-post, on the way to that yearned-for achievement.
From: The Speaker, July 7, 1900, p.394
“Fiction”
By: L.R.F.O.
Mr. Frank Norris has quickly taken a good place among contemporary novelists. His name has become associated with lively and entertaining work. Shanghaied and McTeague both had buoyancy and invention and that kind of vigour which meant that the author would not soon work himself out. In Blix he shows that he can treat a hackneyed theme in a fresh and original manner. Blix is the story of a girl who keeps a young journalist from gambling and inspires his work. He calls her Blix, because — well, because she is Blix. They have tried pretending to be in love with one another and find it dull, so they resolve to be nothing more than comrades — with the usual result. The agony is not long drawn out. Condy Rivers is soon weaned from gambling. Though his first novel is rejected, he soon gets an offer of a post that takes him East, apparently the ambition of all Californians. Blix, of course, really understands that he has loved her ever since they determined to give up that nonsense, and so they both go to New York and the new life.
Thus it will be seen that Mr. Norris has not a very original story to tell. Even in detail we seem to have heard some of it before — such as the answering matrimonial advertisements in other people’s names and the encyclopedic education of the coastguard’s wife, the progress of whose knowledge could be tested by whether her subjects of conversation were in the H’s or the M’s. Yet the familiar air of everything is rather attractive when you get interested in Blix, as you do very soon, and in the somewhat naive journalist, who, to the male reader, at least, is by no means the attraction of the book
. Mr. Norris has a very pretty talent in presenting the atmosphere of particular events. The tea in Chinatown and the day’s fishing described in Blix linger in the memory. They are complete pictures, in which nothing more is needed for the imagination to see everything that happened and to feel everything that was felt. We are grateful to Mr. Norris for a very charming bit of sentiment.
From: The Vassar Miscellany, V. XXIX, No. 3, December 1899, p.197
“Book Reviews”
By: M.L.R., 1900
It is not uncommon nowadays to hear an author’s name coupled with the title, “realist.” Mr. Frank Norris, whose name as yet is hardly familiar to most readers, has come with his three or four books to join the ranks. Blix, the latest, is a pretty little love story, — that is one’s first comment — a brisk tale with real force and vigor is one’s second. It is wonderfully real; one is almost surprised to find, when the book is finished, with what great interest the everyday life of the young San Francisco journalist and the “sweet young girl of nineteen” has been followed.
The story is hardly more than an episode, an idyll it might be called, it is so free from affectation, so simple in its outlines. But it is breezy; there is a youthful thrill in it that lends charm to every page. It has its faults, of course. One becomes weary of having Blix’s appearance described every time her name is mentioned. It is not in the least artistic and it even lessens one’s interest in the story. Mr. Norris’s fault seems to be a lack of literary savoir-faire; a certain amount of conventionality is necessary even in realistic stories. But it would take consummate skill to depict faithfully American life of to-day and make the picture a pleasing one in every detail.
The nature descriptions are exquisite — the country on an early summer morning, the immense expanse of the Pacific, the setting of the sun at the Golden Gate — all are glowing with color, and full of the great mystery of Nature. The broad sweeps of his nature painting form a most effective background for the delicate touches of character drawing. The book is noteworthy; one waits for something more from Mr. Norris, for the sweetness and crispness and originality of Blix are full of promise.
From: The Overland Monthly, V. XIX, No.109, January 1892, p.106
“Recent Verse”
Yvernelle, by Frank Norris, is a legend of chivalry founded on a passage from Goethe, in which a curse is laid by a deserted woman on the woman whose lips shall next touch those of her reluctant lover. Yvernelle falls under the curse and the story is devoted to the purging of the lover’s sin through mortal combat and mastery of self and his final happy union with Yvernelle. The book is a marvel of the printer’s art. The binding is in white and gold, and the illustrations are exquisite both in design and in reproduction. The illuminated figures by Dielman, Shirlaw, and Will S. Low, are especially fine. The text is interesting, sparkles here and there with an apt and pretty figure, and in the fight in the second canto, and in Sir Caverlaye’s ride, rises to a good deal of dramatic force.
From: Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, November 1891, p.647-648
“New Publications”
It has been and it will be the good fortune of few authors to have their writings published with an elegance in any degree comparable to that which distinguishes Mr. Norris’s “Yvernelle.” This narrative poem — a free and flowing fancy of the days of knight-errantry — has been made all splendidly beautiful by the magic touch of the artist’s hand. The three illustrations in color are marvels of reproduction, worthy of fine framing; and the plentiful decorative designs, printed in monotint, show an excellence of drawing and an illustrative value highly meritorious. The volume, indeed, in every detail — in the superior quality of the paper, the faultless printing, the lavish margin, and the rich and tasteful binding — calls for unstinted praise. Its romantic text relates to the ever-glorious days of chivalry, — tells a moving tale in fluent and melodious verse of the loves and battles of a valiant knight who loses his heart in two lands. We are at first not so sure that the gallant Sir Caverlaye deserves our compassion, much less our admiration: he comes to know himself, however, and resolves to forsake the “dark countess of old Spain” and return to the “blue-eyed Yvernelle,” and all our sympathy goes out to him, and we watch with bated breath the course of his adventurous journey into France, his great fight in the forest with the brother of Guhaldrada, and his furious gallop through the wild night to the door of the church wherein the fair Yvernelle stands ready to take the veil.
From: The Critic, V. XVI, No. 414, December 5, 1891, p.316
‘Yvernelle’ is a legend of feudal France, told in octosyllabic couplet verse by Mr. Frank Norris, and handsomely illustrated by Messrs. Church, Dewey, Dielman, Garrett, Low, Shirlaw and other artists. The author knows how to tell a story and also how to write in the manner of Sir Walter. His lines have plenty of swing and music, and the narrative advances steadily without any break in the movement of the verse. The mediaeval character of the legend is well sustained, and there is plot and incident enough to make the story interesting. The illustrations, particularly the two heads — one by Low, the other by Dielman, — which are reproduced in color, contribute much to the beauty of the book and make it among the most attractive of the holiday volumes. It will please those who are fond of pictures quite as much as those who are fond of rhymed legends; and people who like both will be doubly pleased.
From: Literature: an International Gazette of Criticism, V.3, No. 61, December 17, 1898, p.577-578
“American ‘Letter”
“Some Recent Novels”
By: William Dean Howells
In a way, all portraiture of life on the terms that fiction proposes is impossible. Life cannot give any one its confidence literally and really as the novelist say it has done in a certain case; it is essentially incapable of being so interviewed. But unless you grant the preposterous premise that it can be shown in its deepest intimacies by fiction, you simply cannot have fiction; the thing ends before it has begun.
The question, after the premise is granted, is how much impossibility shall colour situations, characters, and incidents. For myself, after I have supposed the case, after I have once made the immense concession asked of me by the art, I like to have the artist keep to ‘the closest verisimilitude in everything. I feel that in supposing he can represent life at all, I have done enough, and that he is then bound not to falsify its motives and circumstances at all. It is for some such reason as this that between two extremely clever stories by two rather new writers choose one for greater praise and the other for less; and I cannot allow that they are of kindred quality because the less praiseworthy approaches the more praiseworthy in its methods. That approach is rather too much like the homage which vice pays to virtue for my austere morality.
I am obliged to own that I read the two books I mean with almost the same breathlessness; if anything I gasped rather more in the crucial moments of “Moran of the Lady Letty” than in those of “The Money Captain”; but I do not consider even my own gasps criticisms; for the gasps of other people I have no more regard than for their goose-flesh. Still, “Moran” is a clever little story, and if the reader does not mind granting, after the working hypothesis, that a young society man in San Francisco can be drugged, cast aboard a fishing-schooner, and articled with a belaying-pin for a voyage to the waters of Southern California, there to take sharks for their livers in the employ of the Chinese Six Companies, I cannot deny that he will find a good deal of reality in the society man himself, as well as in the pirate-souled skipper, and the several Chinese cooks who manage the crew. As for the incidents, they follow one another with a profusion and a rapidity which leave one little leisure for question of their probability, from the time the skipper and the hero board a derelict vessel which promptly blows up with the skipper and leaves the hero in charge of the gigantic sea-girl Moran. She is the daughter of the Norse captain of the derelict, she was born and brought up on the ocean, and she has always lived the life of a man. She promptly takes command of the
schooner, and the hero becomes her mate and remains no more than her comrade till she turns upon him in the madness of a hand-to hand fight with Chinese pirates, and finds him more than her match in a sort of Siegfried scuffle. She then duly owns her love, but the vigilance of the author prevents her marriage with the hero when they return to civilization, and he again becomes a society man. The captain of the Chinese pirate is her prisoner on board the schooner, and while the hero is gone to tea on a neighbouring yacht he seizes the chance to make fight for the lump of ambergris which first caused her trouble with him and his crew. Moran has no longer the strength of former days; her love has sapped her courage; she has instinctively become dependent on a man for her defence, and she falls under the Chinaman’s knife.
In simply stating the scheme of any romanticistic story one has an unkind air of mocking it; but I should sincerely deprecate this in the case of “Moran of the Lady Letty,” to which I am grateful for some rapid passages of time, to say no less. The story gains a certain effectiveness from being so boldly circumstanced in the light of common day, and in a time and place of our own. Whoever desires a thrill may find it in this fresh and courageous invention, which has some divinations of human nature, as differenced in man nature and woman nature, and some curious glimpses of conditions. You are aware, in these, of a San Francisco world, as in “The Money Captain “ you are aware of a Chicago world, interestingly unlike other worlds on either shore of the Atlantic...